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A recent article in the NY Times detailing the shrinking demand for live classical musicians is quite disheartening:

In New York's classical-music world most of the attention falls on the big boys: the New York Philharmonic, the Metropolitan Opera, the major international orchestras that pass through Carnegie Hall, the glamorous soloists who can earn tens of thousands of dollars an appearance.

But night after night highly trained players traipse from Washington Heights or the Upper West Side or northern New Jersey or Long Island to play church jobs and weddings, Lincoln Center and Broadway summer festivals and fill-in jobs at the Met and the Philharmonic. They occupy the ranks of a dozen freelance orchestras, put the music in Broadway musicals and provide soundtracks -- or at least they used to -- for Hollywood and Madison Avenue. They form the bedrock of musical life in a great cultural capital.

You know what's coming...

It was a good living. But the New York freelance musician -- a bright thread in the fabric of the city -- is dying out. In an age of sampling, digitization and outsourcing, New York's soundtrack and advertising-jingle recording industry has essentially collapsed. Broadway jobs are in decline. Dance companies rely increasingly on recorded music. And many freelance orchestras, among the last steady deals, are cutting back on their seasons, sometimes to nothingness.

Contracts for most of the freelance orchestras expired in September, and the players face the likelihood of further cuts in pay, or at least a freeze. All these orchestras rely on donations and, to a small extent, government grants. The Great Recession has taken its toll, putting a number of them under severe financial pressure.

The facts are stark:

The Brooklyn Philharmonic, founded in 1954, has essentially stopped performing as an orchestra. The Long Island Philharmonic has only one concert scheduled this season -- a Broadway medley -- because of financial problems, although it is continuing its education programs. The Opera Orchestra of New York, which canceled its season last year, has come back with two concerts this year. The American Composers Orchestra is down to three concerts a year in the smaller Zankel Hall instead of five in Carnegie Hall's main auditorium less than a decade ago.

The Queens Symphony, which is supported mainly by the state and the city, has reduced its size to anywhere from 17 to 36 players from around 65, which means presenting smaller-scale programming. The Westchester Philharmonic, despite the star power of its music director, Itzhak Perlman, has $385,000 of debt and has had trouble paying its musicians. The American Symphony Orchestra has run $300,000 to $400,000 deficits a season for the last several years, with the gaps covered at the last minute by donors.

Ugh...it's bleak:

"This is first time that there are quite a few managements coming to us and saying, 'We just don't have money,'" said Eugene Moye Jr., a veteran cellist who serves on the players committees in several orchestras. "Our community is under a lot of pressure. Our jobs are melting away. We have a lot of people who are right on the edge."

Another component of the middle class takes a body blow as a result of the credit crises on Wall Street in the Fall of 2008, perhaps withering away completely. The stories are certainly out there:

Clay Ruede, 55, typified the freelance life that once was. Soon after he arrived in New York with his cello in 1977, music making filled his days and evenings. He crisscrossed the city for recording sessions, Broadway shows, substitute jobs at the Metropolitan Opera, gigs at the Mostly Mozart Festival and rehearsals with his Arden Trio.

He played his last Broadway show, "The Color Purple," in February 2008. He hasn't recorded a movie soundtrack in eight years. With his income down from six figures to about $30,000 this year, Mr. Ruede (pronounced REE-dee) has sold his spare cello and bow, put a playlist from a gig with Bjork on eBay and plans to short-sell his house in Englewood, N.J., to make ends meet.

"The last three years I've just been barely making it," he said. "I've done stuff I haven't done since I was a teenager: playing weddings for cash, cocktail parties, things I never would have deigned to do. But you do what you have to." His next steady engagement is not until March.

Although bleak, us musicians will not give up. We don't throw in the towel that easy!

To make ends meet older freelancers are also trying to adapt. Dale Stuckenbruck, 57, of West Hempstead, N.Y., a violinist and freelance veteran who lacks enough union work to qualify for health insurance, has developed a specialty playing the musical saw and teaching music to youngsters, helping them make traditional Chinese violins and instruments out of vegetables. He has taken on more violin students and teaches at the C. W. Post campus of Long Island University and the Waldorf School in Garden City, N.Y.

"The modern artist has to be much more diversified," he said. "You cannot play just Wieniawski or Chopin."

His enthusiasm for playing the violin, he added, has not waned. "I do what I do 24 hours a day, and I love every second," he said. "That's what an artist is. We love it so deeply. We go with what it is. It's not a job. It's our life."

Amen to that.

And besides, what else were we put on the earth to do? As Friedrich Nietzsche once said, "Without music, life would be a mistake..."

Postscript: WNYC carried this story, too, under the headline "Plight of the Classical Freelancer." Check it out, particularly when jazz bassist Doug Weiss called in with a comment (around minute 22:00).

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